Wilfried Hou Je Bek on Fri, 11 Jul 2003 23:32:56 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> STRANGER THAN ANY PYNCHON CONSPIRACY [Aaahhh] |
STRANGER THAN ANY PYNCHON CONSPIRACY [Aaahhh] ubiquitous computing in .walk (by Barnaby Snap, Helsinki) Sitting in the park one rare sunny afternoon, I noticed something peculiar about certain members of the crowd passing-by. Some of them were carrying a green A4 which they were passionately studying at every turn in order to find out where they had to go. It was definitely not a map, maybe an itinerary of some kind. But even though they had instructions they didn't really seem to have a destination either. Normally only people who are looking for something, or who are lost, take the same streets over & over again like these paper carrying pedestrians did. But they seemed to pretty sure where they were going to. After a while, trying to work it all out, the purpose of this strange behaviour dawned on me. [Aaahhh] I thought. Oh no! I thought also, it's another one of those zany generative psychogeography experiments which seem to be going on everywhere at the moment. I mean, you can go to any random blog & within 3 double clicks you find yet another report of a psychogeographic walk talking about 'aimlessly wandering in memory of the flaneur' & 'the sublime spell of the algorithm' always supplemented by shady pictures of even shadier back-alleys or modernist high-rises towering into the sky. Well you know, it was fun in the beginning but now it's just everywhere, psychogeography has become as fashionable as Prada. What do I say, it's even worse: psychogeography has turned into the Dolce & Gabana of the pedestrian underground. I stopped a boy & a girl walking hand in hand, who were of the age that you really should be thinking about other things, like if I may suggest drinking beer & smoking marijuana (just like the real flaneur did), instead of participating in a pointless [second left, first right, second left, repeat] walk. So I stopped them, wanting to point out to him that geezers need excitement & that she was young, much to young, doing psychogeography with a kid she could be having fun with. But (2[step/tone] puns aside) while talking to them I found out that my suspicion was only partly right. I also found out that what was going on around me was stranger than any Pynchonite conspiracy: I had not solemnly been watching the meandering of psychogeographers walking on an algorithm but the peripatetic processing of data within an ubiquitous computer in the truest sense of the word [Aaahhh]. The couple was doing a .walk; a dotwalk. Apparently it has all got to do with added functionality. Like an umbrella that doubles as a chair, the dot in the walk turns psychogeography into the Swiss army knife of non-electronic computation; think Turing, think Apollinaire applied by Torvalds. The way they explained it, it all sounds as far out as Kool Keith doing his Dr. Octagon shizzle, but let the truth be told, the concept was not utterly devoid of logic, albeit in it's own schizophrenic mode. Because, so the reasoning goes, people were already executing algorithms by walking them for psychogeographical causes like 'unpredictability of the route' & 'the non-subjectivity of the directions' [Aaahhh], it's a small step to use them at the same time to do what algorithms do: perform calculations. If this is possible & there are no reason's why it isn't, it is possible to construct a 'Universal Psychogeographical Computer' a strange construction in which people doing walks generate a computer. [Aaahhh] So... there is code, with an extension called .walk (the couple was indeed carrying something resembling computer code which they were running... [Aaahhh] walking) & all these people participating together produce it's walktime. [Aaahhh] you will think & you go ahead thinking [Aaahhh] for a while, if you are as intelligent as I am & I'm sure you are, you will decide for yourself that it all makes sense. [Aaahhh] [Aaahhh] .Walk has the catchphrase 'Walking Apart Together' & the key moment in the functioning of this pedestrian computer is the random encounter: when 2 different psychogeographers cross paths, they immediately start writing down all sorts of stuff from the other's piece of paper. During these exchanges the data that is generated during walking slowly builds up within the system. But information only becomes intelligence when it can reach the individuals in the network that need it. Information want to be valuable, so the saying goes, it's the same here & therefore data must flow through the system rapidly. People are already talking to do .walks by bike to enhance the processing speed, thus creating a 'cyclotron'. But let's stick to the point, shall we? When an agent receives new data it doesn't need to be valuable at that time for that particular agent. But because it gets stored anyway, the information has copied (double, than trebled, in exponential speed) & is increasingly more likely to find an agent elsewhere who can use that data. To get this .walk system to work you only need the numbers to beat statistics; remember how ants tackle the same problem. I didn't get the chance to talk to the people of socialfiction.org who are behind all this, but I did found out that the project has just started & that for now their main concern is to let people get used to the idea, many people who are unprepared to the concepts seem to be overcome by codefobia when confronted with a huge slab of .walk code to be walked. Perhaps not that strange when you look at previous experiments on their site. I only wonder if it's possible to program artificial intelligence in .walk. .walk: http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk ===== http://www.socialfiction.org http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net